Playing the Indian Princess?: Sarah Winnemucca's Newspaper Career and Performance of American Indian Identities

On May 2, 1883, the Northern Paiute educator, translator, author, and activist Sarah Winnemucca lectured at Boston's Hotel Winthrop, declaring:

I can tell you how few of the Government supplies reach the Indians; how one little blanket was provided to shelter a family of six from the cold; how three blankets were supposed to be enough for fifteen Indians, when each of them should by right have had one; how, indeed they often have to buy the very supplies that the Government has promised to give them in exchange for their land. I have asked the agents why they did these wrong things. They have told me it was necessary for them to do so in order to get money enough to send to the Great Father at Washington to keep their position. I assure you that there is an Indian ring; that it is a corrupt ring, and that it has its head and shoulders in the treasury at Washington.

("Princess Winnemucca on the Treatment of Indians")

Winnemucca had been lecturing for two months at the start of a northeastern lecture tour, speaking on behalf of "all the Indians who [were] afflicted with that terrible pest—the Indian Agent" ("Indian Agents").

Winnemucca commented that most people did not "know much about Indians," and thus many of her lectures promoted cultural as well as political awareness. Her immediate goals were to secure land rights for Northern Paiutes and to persuade the US government to allow for the return of Northern Paiutes who had been unjustly removed to Yakima, Washington, after the Bannock War. She told audiences:

I want to test the right of the Government to make and break treaties at pleasure. They gave my people that place of land, and I want to ask whether it is legal for them to sell it or not. And in this work I want your help. Will you give me your influence? My work must be done through Congress. Talk for me and help me talk, and all will be well.

("Appeal for Justice")

To these ends, by fall 1883, Winnemucca published the book for which she is best known today, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims.¹ Winnemucca's increased prominence—resulting from the news media's coverage of her lectures and book and assisted by the indefatigable promotional efforts of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody—earned her access to many influential reformers and politicians. By spring 1884, she testified before the US House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs. When she returned to Nevada, funds donated by eastern reformers allowed her to challenge US boarding school and English-only policies.

Winnemucca's campaign would have been much harder, if not impossible, had she failed to garner newspaper coverage. In an age when American newspapers reported on US-Indian Relations in a sporadic and biased manner, Winnemucca produced sustained, specific, and often sympathetic coverage. She was well aware of newspapers' power, as demonstrated by the more than four hundred newspaper items by or about Winnemucca from her first public appearance in 1864 to her death in 1891 that form the basis of this essay. As the first section of this essay details, Winnemucca understood that newspapers had the power to shape public opinion locally and nationally. She struggled—and was often able—to control newspaper representations about herself, Northern Paiutes, and American Indians. Creating and controlling news coverage was key to her political strategy; she recognized that newspapers were sites wherein resistance had to take place. She was politically astute and rhetorically sophisticated, a savvy negotiator of the news media.

Yet the critical stories we hear most about Winnemucca's lecture in the Hotel Winthrop that May evening and in general emphasize not her media savvy but rather her performance as an Indian princess. Certainly, on that night and on other occasions, she presented herself as such. For example, the Evening Transcript reported:

The princess . . . was richly and fantastically attired, her dress of buckskin, short-sleeved and of moderate length, being trimmed with an abundance of sparkling beads...